Blog Carnival: How to Build, Maintain and Evaluate a Great Website

Check out this month’s nonprofit blog carnival. It’s all about how to build, maintain and evaluate a great nonprofit website.There’s a contribution from yours truly, as well as nine other posts to take your website to the next level.

It’s still surprising that with all the great marketing advice available to nonprofits today, so many folks still aren’t adjusting their writing, adding enough visual elements to their websites to make them compelling and adding share buttons so it’s easy for their constituents to engage with them and each other.

Through the Carnival you’ll find outwhy it’s easier to manage your website (and less expensive) than it was “back in the day;” how to make ongoing updates that keep your site fresh; how to plan your site’s content using a ‘wireframe,’ and how to make your site exceptionally user-friendly.

Finally, you’ll learn how to use some web analytics to track what’s happening. Who’s using your site?From where do they access it? How do you turn data, like Google analytics, into insights that are actionable?And are you in compliance with legal requirements?

A blog carnival, by the way, is simply a collection of blog posts all written around a similar theme.The Nonprofit Blog Carnival has different hosts every month.August was about nonprofit newsletter trends. Coming up next is how nonprofits are using CRM and predictive analytics to successfully implement multichannel campaigns. The host is Miriam Kagan over at npENGAGEand she’ll no doubt welcome your submission, due by October 28th!

Engaging your help was such a huge pivot moment for me and the Board. We would never – not in a million years – have even dreamed of doing a significant challenge at our event without all of the teaching, support, resources and guidance that you brought to us. Sometimes there are these moments in life that you only realize in retrospect were miracles – and that is exactly how I look back at that decision to work with you on our fundraising engine!

Claire Axelrad has been a highly effective fundraiser for over 30 years and her blog is just a wealth of wisdom. What’s particularly notable about Clairification is that although the work is based on decades of past experience, Claire is always looking forward as well. She was the first among her veteran fundraising peers to embrace online and social fundraising and is now one of their most sensible and insightful proponents. She’s a great resource!

You have been absolutely terrific to work with. Your roadmap and assessment of where we are and where we can go has been so instrumental in having the board stop and think about our future. Your audit is allowing us to move forward in tangible ways to improve our work so that we may help more clients in need of our services. I will count you among my many blessings throughout the year.

I’m subscribed to a million fundraising blogs and the one I consistently open and read most of, is yours. The content is always carefully curated and helpful, not just sales pitch after sales pitch for your own stuff. You stand out, in a good way.

You are one of the few fundraising experts that I read faithfully, and we have no shortage of those who publish regularly. But your material is always thoughtful and realistic. Thank you for your candor and good advice.

I read your newsletter all the time and find your advice “spot on” and always usable. I pass it on consistently to the staff and other board members. I really appreciate all you do to help nonprofits. Thanks.

You remind me about what is most important and why I love this profession. I just discovered you and your blog about three weeks ago and I wanted to write today to say thank you for sharing your wisdom and expertise. I find your posts, new and old, so spot on. You nail it.

Everybody involved in philanthropy should read these articles slowly and with a very opened mind and a willingness to take from them the necessary components to change the manner and techniques we presently use in order to embrace what philanthropy is all about “Love”. I have no doubt it would be transformational.

I came across your website and I hit the goldmine! I was asked to join a board and found I need to understand how to build a donor base from the ground up. I searched, only to find expensive consultants or free info that didn’t offer any helpful information. Thank you for sharing so much valuable information!!

Wow! Inspiration out the wazoo! Many thanks — I keep up with trends and lots of blog-posts to stay on top of my game. This goes way beyond technique and reaches deep inside to remind me why I’ve done this work for 40 years!

Thank you for your brilliant blog. I have been a follower for many years and learnt so much from you. Ultimately, it translates into many more families getting the support they deserve. You help me raise more money for my UK charity. Please never stop bringing the best out of me! You’re special.

Exactly what our profession can use – clarification –- the title of your blog. You help us keep faith with the past while making sense of the present and future. You have a balanced and respectful understanding of what this is all about. Thanks.

I’d recommend you sign up. I signed up for about a dozen blogging fundraiser consultants, but have since canceled most. She’s one of two left standing. I like how she organizes her thoughts about fundraising, and her conversation planning techniques are very familiar to me from my work as a prosecutor. I believe that she was a practicing attorney and who changed careers like I have, and my best guess is that she was a litigator as well. This is a very good article and there are several other blogs (her own) that she links to within it, so even though this is a small article you could spend some time here.